Terror and Democracy in West Germany

In 1970, the Red Army Faction declared war on West Germany. The militants failed to bring down the state, but this book argues that the decade-long debate they inspired helped shape a new era. After 1945, West Germans answered longstanding doubts about democracy's viability and fears of authoritarian state power with a “militant democracy” empowered against its enemies and a popular commitment to anti-fascist resistance. In the 1970s, these postwar solutions brought Germans into open confli...